Tocqueville's Catholic America
by H. W. Crocker III - September 2, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Hugh Brogan, Yale University Press, $35, 736 pages
Alexis de Tocqueville was born—and died—a Catholic. He lost his faith as an adolescent, but it had already broadened and enlightened him (indeed, his childhood tutor was a beloved priest) and made him the brilliant political observer he would become.
Tocqueville was an aristocrat from a family that had stood by the Bourbons and suffered under the Revolution. He remained proud of that heritage, yet thought of himself as a liberal and a republican. The France in which he reached political maturity was divided among the Bourbon legitimists (the tradition from which Tocqueville sprang), the usurping Orléanist liberal monarchists (of which, at times, he was a grudging ally), Napoleonists, and a variety of republicans, among whose number he eventually situated himself. Even in marriage he appeared to turn his back on a family whose name and traditions he venerated. He married a commoner, and moreover, an Englishwoman.
But Tocqueville was no rebel. If he was republican, he was a self-confessedly very conservative one. He was a classical liberal who, like the legitimists, hated socialism, centralized state power, and equality (the envy of the masses, he feared, could make democracy an enemy of liberty); he believed in aristocratic rule (his best friends were fellow sons of legitimists); and he loathed the Napoleonists (Napoleon was his bête noir). As for religion, he thought it an essential prop to liberty (which he loved above all else) and was happy to see the Church prosper. Tocqueville's English wife and mother-in-law converted to the Faith; he was tended by nuns during his long, final illness; and when he died, it was with his sins shriven, in communion with the Church, and at peace.
Hugh Brogan's giant new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville is a wonderfully consuming portrait of Tocqueville and his ideas. Because Brogan has been in conversation with his subject for his entire adult life—he began studying Tocqueville as an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, and is now a retired professor—he sweeps the reader easily along and can be simultaneously admiring, judicious, and critical of his subject. There are a few authorial slips—chiefly when the author's prejudices (to the left of Tocqueville's) are judged to be authoritative, while to some readers it might appear that Tocqueville's are closer to the mark.
Tocqueville, though an astute observer, certainly resonated best with men who thought like himself; and during his famed journey in America, he found many such, traveling, as he did, largely in Federalist circles, among men who shared his aristocratic principles and anti-democratic fears. More than that, he saw America through the eyes of a Catholic. While he applauded America's robust religious sense, he found Protestantism baffling.
"He could not," in Brogan's words, "see the logic of ordinary Protestantism at all, and felt this so strongly that he committed himself to the view that Protestantism was dying out, and in so doing was preparing the ground for a final collision between unbelief and Catholicism." Tocqueville "was glad to hear, and eager to believe, that Catholicism was rapidly gaining ground in the United States, as indeed it was."
Whenever Tocqueville came face-to-face with Catholicism in the English-speaking world, his spirits were lifted. In Canada, he loved les Canadiens, who were much happier and more charming than the Americans (or indeed the French at home). And during his travels in Britain, he found the Irish similarly whimsical, frank, and fun, and reminiscent of the French in a way the English weren't. At dinner with an Irish bishop, the conversation, Tocqueville wrote, was "enthusiastic, superficial, frivolous, often marked by jokes and witticisms."
In North America, the French-Canadian peasants were self-reliant, independent salts of the earth, immune from immorality, sincere in their religion, and guided by priests of the best French sort—"gay, lively, mocking, lovers of glory and fame." "Here," Tocqueville wrote, "the curé is indeed the shepherd of his flock; there is nothing of the industrial religion of most American ministers."
His love of Canada and America was abetted too by the fact that every priest he met shared his belief that religion gained immeasurably when priests stayed out of politics. Why, in North America, even the Indians of the interior, 70 years after the fall of New France, still greeted Europeans with a stoic "bonjour." What was not to like?
